What Dies in Summer (30 page)

We walked out to the front porch, where he set his sweating glass down on the porch rail and glanced up at the tinkling wind chime near the corner of the porch. He stretched, then reached into
his pocket and brought out a small matchbox, opening it to give me a look. In the box were three yellowish teeth with blunt brown prongs at the bottoms. One of the teeth had a silver-looking
filling.

“Cam’s,” said Don.

We walked around back to what had been L.A.’s window, and Don fitted the teeth one at a time to the dents I’d found in the wood of the sill. He let me feel how when you held the
tooth down in the right impression and tried to twist it there was no movement at all.

“Proves what you figured out—Earl wasn’t our guy,” he said.

I nodded.

“But when you found these marks you didn’t think it would do any good to call us . . .”

I swallowed hard.

“. . . and you were afraid of the possible consequences, am I right?”

I nodded again.

“You didn’t want to scare your Gram or Lee Ann unnecessarily or take a chance on busting up your family.”

He looked at me for a while. I cleared my throat.

He said, “Next time I’m thinking you’ll know better.”

“Yes sir.”

SOMETIMES
Gram would stop in at the gas station where Jack worked now to get the Buick gassed up, always saying something like, “Jack, I wonder
if you might just check the tires and see if you can get that little spot you missed back there on the window? Thank you so much.” At this point Jack would usually give me a homicidal glare,
but the time when I was afraid of him was over. It wasn’t just that his neck and eye were messed up, or that you could tell his reflexes and nerve were gone. It was realizing that it had
never really been me he needed to destroy—it had been his own weakness. One time at the station when I got out of the car to go inside for a Coke, standing up in front of him just as he
approached the car door, he flinched and brought his arms up to cover before he could stop himself, exactly as I had done with him so many times. At that moment I saw him as he experienced
himself—a lost boy too scared to cry, knowing there was no help for him anywhere and understanding that in the ways that truly counted he was the worst things there are in the world for a man
to be: helpless and alone.

When Jack had been caught in the raid with Hubert and Shepherd Boy at the Triple-X Bookstore downtown, Gram said all it cost him was a fine. But Shepherd Boy didn’t come to our church
anymore, his name disappearing from the bulletins and newsletters and never again being mentioned by Brother Wells, or anyone else as far as I knew.

Hubert landed in juvenile court for the bookstore thing but just got remanded to the custody of his parents. I saw him around sometimes, wearing black clothes and letting his hair get shaggier
and longer. He showed me a gun he said he’d stolen from somebody’s car, a small chrome-plated .25 automatic with black plastic grips, and told me he’d started carrying it in his
pocket everywhere he went.

“Wanta go out to the tracks and shoot it?” he said. “I got shells.”

“Nah,” I said, knowing that a few weeks ago I would have gone without a second thought.

L.A. and I hadn’t seen Fangbaby in weeks, finally admitting to ourselves she was gone for good. But I’d been wrong about her. She had let L.A. touch the tip of her nose the last time
we saw her. Maybe it was the cheese L.A. was holding.

Dr. Kepler had died three weeks after the day of the applesauce, and the funeral home cremated her according to the instructions in her will. They put her in a fancy silver jar that Gram called
a funerary urn, which to me didn’t look big enough to hold a cat. Since she had no family and there’d been no funeral service, Gram said putting her on our mantel beside the picture of
Gramp in his black suit would have to serve as her last rites. I wondered what the ashes looked like but somehow couldn’t bring myself to look. It was no problem for L.A., though. She took
the lid off the urn, peered inside and said, “Just looks like dry dirt.”

We gathered in front of the mantel and Gram read a poem called “Our Saviour’s Other Sheep” from one of her books while L.A. kind of stood at attention and looked very serious,
even though she was like Dr. Kepler herself in having few if any supernatural beliefs. On a sheet of blue paper from the stationery box I printed the quotation Dr. Kepler had written inside the
cover of the copy of
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
she’d given me. It read:

Folding the paper carefully, I put it under the urn. Then Gram made L.A. and me bow our heads with her for a moment of silence, and that was the end of it.

At first it was eerie having her up there on the mantel like some silent witness to our comings and goings, but eventually we all pretty much got used to it. Sometimes when nobody else was
around I even talked to her, which seemed to help me sort out my thinking and gave me the feeling she was still with us in some way.

In spite of not wanting to be away from Diana and spending more and more time with her at the end of that summer, I still kept going to the pool with L.A. whenever I could. Out there it was like
the air was her real element and gravity didn’t apply to her. When I watched her at the pool it seemed to me she was trying to fly away from what had happened to her, and I hoped the air was
having some healing effect, because of course she was flying for me too.

After the newspaper did a photo series on her a diving coach from the university came down to watch her one Saturday, later visiting the house to talk to L.A. and Gram about the Olympic trials
the year after next.

“She has tremendous talent,” the woman said. “It would be criminal to let it go to waste.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You gotta do it,” I said to L.A. when the woman had gone.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Shit, L.A., I’m serious! You gotta!”

She shrugged.

She kept visiting Dr. Ballard occasionally for a while, but as time went by she gradually drifted away from us. I kept looking for some altered awareness in her, some sign that she was going to
be all right, but there was nothing. We saw less and less of her, and she would never talk about where she’d been. A couple of times I’d seen her hanging out with Hubert after school
and I knew she went down to Beauchamp’s almost every day now, sometimes staying until Froggy locked up. Once when Gram was away for the weekend with some friends in Fort Worth I found L.A.
passed out drunk on the floor in the bathroom and helped her to her bed. She seemed to have almost no weight. Sitting on the side of the bed, watching her sleep, I smoothed her wild dark hair back
from her face and tried to think of a way to pray for her, but no words came to me.

Whoever or whatever had stood by my bed through so many nights never came again, and now when I dreamed about Dee or the dead girls, more and more often I saw them lying down peacefully in some
safe place, their eyes closed and their hands folded. The girls were whole again, covered instead of naked and cold, and Dee no longer grieved for the father and the life I’d stolen from him.
Somewhere in a diamond-clear dimension of truth Dr. Kepler forgot cancer and the ovens and the brownshirts, and under some forgiving sun Gramp laid down the terrible weight he carried and at last
stood straight again. And on the deserted midnight highway that ran through the center of my heart, my own father finally walked free of the endless flames, his face fresh and unscarred.

Once or twice I even imagined that all of them, shining with a pure soft light, stood together in some high and blessed place, held out their hands to me across the dark universes and forgave
me.